Patron only: stage 9 prototype (Patreon)

Our preview this time is a Monk. And also a Pirate. Because reasons.

Silver Tooth Flynn, Human Monk Pirate

For completeness, here are updated versions of the previous previews:

Ezren, Human Wizard

Amiri, Human Barbarian

Estrelle, Elf Druid

Hmm. I feel like there's a lot of humans there. I should do a gnome next.

Public preview

To coincide with the release of Pathfinder Second Edition, I'm releasing the monk sheet to the public as well. The official character sheet was published, and a lot of people weren't entirely happy with it, so I feel like now is a perfect time to get the word out.

Don't worry, the majority of previews are going to remain patron-only. I do appreciate you guys.

What's new

Several of you commented that the minimal inventory in the last prototype didn't work for you, so I've moved that back to its own half-sized page. I may yet experiment with other layouts until I find one that I'm happy with.

I've also moved ancestry feats onto the same page as skill and general feats, and I think it's happier there. This clearly separates the mechanical parts of the character from the roleplay parts.

Reading from the actual book has allowed me to refine some of the rules, for example with regards to focus points and focus spells, shields, etc.

I added an archetype, to show how they work. Archetypes consist of a single dedication feat, followed by a number of other feats that may be taken later. The only archetypes in the Core Rulebook are the multiclass ones, but I stuck with the pirate because it's awesome.

The monk page shows one important aspect of the new sheets: specialisations. At character creation time, as well as selecting your ancestry, background, class etc, you can also select your sorcerer's bloodline, your bard's muse, your barbarian's instinct, and so on. I'm never going to go down the road of including every possible feat you could take, but I can include your class' defining decision. And I will, obviously, try to add the extras that get published.

(I'm aware that, RAW, the monk doesn't have to select a stance at all. But be honest, everyone who plays a monk is probably going to.)

API

On a technical level, what I did this time was to put a proper API on the front of my library. That API takes a JSON object describing your character, and works out from that what pieces to combine.

This decouples the way the API is used from needing intimate knowledge of the internals of how it works.

Open source

Don't forget, I'm publishing this library as a Node module. You're welcome to pull this and use it in your own projects. Caveat emptor, though, it's still changing daily.

The flipside is that I hope to get other people to help with adding content. Not the core character sheet design, but there's no reason somebody couldn't help add background, ancestries, and even third-party material.

That wasn't really possible before, because the technology stack I built it on up to now was pretty obscure (Adobe Illustrator + Scala + git + D&D? Not many people know more than two of those at once). The new stack should hopefully be a lot more inclusive.

What's next

Stage 10: Integrate with a web service

As mentioned last time, this should be fairly simple. It's taking the library I've already published, and serving it through a web front end with a dummy form. "Click here to dispense druid."

Perhaps the only complicated bit will be hooking it up to use the repository full of portraits and logos that's part of the website.

Stage 11: Generate the form

In order to make choice and build your character, you need a form that has all the options available. I'm not going to make that by hand, because it would quickly get out of date as new content gets added. Instead the form will be generated from data - the same unit data that the library uses to actually generate the character sheets, so it all comes full circle. This will be the real test of whether the API that I put in place is designed right.

The result at this stage should be, at last, a public preview that you can use yourself on the dev website.

Stage 12: Real data

I have the Core Rulebook now. That means I can start to put real data in, without wondering how it's going to change. I still won't start putting in all the real data until after stages 10 and 11 are done, though.

After this point, it all gets a bit vague. There are a bunch of other things I'll need to do, such as get the translation system working, making a preview of all of the classes, writing a guide for how to add content, and so on. I think I need a different set of class icons.